"We think kids are so fragile. Tell them the truth. They are resilient."

March 2, 2016 10:41 AM

Researchers have found that students who learn about famous scientists' personal and scientific struggles outperform students who only learn of those scientists' achievements.

A team from Columbia University and the University of Washington published their findings (16-page PDF) in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

Xiaodong Lin-Siegler, an associate professor of cognitive studies at Columbia University’s Teachers College who led the study, told Quartz that the results surprised her. The experiment could have gone two ways, she explained: Learning that Einstein or Curie struggled could lead kids to throw up their hands and say “if Einstein can’t do it, then I certainly can’t either.” Or, it might inspire them by showing that everyone—even the greats—face seemingly insurmountable challenges.

“In our culture we always say you don’t want to intimidate kids, you don’t want to tell them how hard the work is,” she noted. But the experiment showed the opposite strategy works better: Showing how great scientists had to muddle through lots of tough stuff made the subject matter real and allowed students to connect with them as people.

posted by Etrigan (44 comments total)

Perhaps this explains partially why presentations of scientific advancement like COSMOS are so enthusiastically relished by young minds? The original series certainly made a huge impact on me as a kid.
posted by trackofalljades at 10:46 AM on March 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

As I've said before, one of the best lessons my parents taught me was how to fail. They pushed me into sports because they knew that it was something that didn't come naturally to me, and that the experience of pushing myself to do something that I might not succeed at would be valuable.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:47 AM on March 2, 2016 [7 favorites]

When I was in 8th grade I did my science project on one of Newton's laws, and ended up reading about Isaac the dude. Who was an enormous asshole, it turns out. It was pretty good information for me to have. You can be good at a lot of things, some people can be ridiculously great at some things, but no one is perfect, no one is good at all of the things all of the time, and some people are enormous assholes.
posted by phunniemee at 10:47 AM on March 2, 2016 [17 favorites]

This makes a lot of sense to me. I spent a lot of time when I was young assuming that I couldn't write a novel. I felt like it should come easily to me; I should just be able to sit down and write one without doubt or deleting or struggling to figure out what happens next. It's no coincidence that I didn't write my first novel until after I read Stephen King's ON WRITING. Seeing the pros struggled reassured me that most people don't write effortless novels-- but if they keep going, they do eventually write them.
posted by headspace at 10:51 AM on March 2, 2016 [6 favorites]

This is great. Science is basically serialized failure; the trick is figuring out what you can learn from each failure, and fail differently next time.
posted by Existential Dread at 10:53 AM on March 2, 2016 [13 favorites]

I question the premise this seems to be based on, that students aren't already taught about these struggles.

Isn't the myth that Einstein failed in grade school really widespread? I know we learned about Curie's struggles in public high school in Texas in the 90s.
posted by Sangermaine at 10:55 AM on March 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I question the premise this seems to be based on, that students aren't already taught about these struggles.

Are they on the Regents Exams? Then no, they're not.
posted by Etrigan at 10:56 AM on March 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

I question the premise this seems to be based on, that students aren't already taught about these struggles.

In the USA, there's little if any mention of the actual lives of scientists in standardized testing and therefore teachers (regardless of their possible personal enthusiasm for the subject) are generally not able to dwell on them much. The same goes for a lot of historical figures actually, they are dehumanized into a discrete number of discoveries, battles, treaties, elections, etc. with dates. This is currently becoming more commonplace, not less. Also there is a concerted effort among religious conservatives not to teach about science and scientists at all, and in some places that influences public schools not just church schools and homeschooling.
posted by trackofalljades at 11:00 AM on March 2, 2016 [13 favorites]

How unsurprising.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 11:05 AM on March 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

There's a reason that PhD students in my field are always passing this quote from Charles Darwin in a letter to Lyell around:

But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.— I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids & today I hate them worse than everything so farewell & in a sweet frame of mind, I am
Ever yours,
C. Darwin

And of course, that reason is that it's comforting to know that you're not the only one who has a bad day and feels dumb sometimes, and that human people like you can still come up with really important insights. I am always smiling at my students and telling them that this stuff that I'm teaching them really is difficult, but that I believe they can do it. I've found that it works much better than telling them that this is really easy, because then when they realize it's not they either blame themselves or they check out. If I agree with them that this is difficult but hand them the tools to surmount it, they don't give up when it doesn't immediately make sense.
posted by sciatrix at 11:07 AM on March 2, 2016 [119 favorites]

Charles Darwin put a bombardier beetle in his mouth, as did Thomas Eisner, a pioneer of chemical ecology, and that didn't stop either of them from continuing their scientific careers. (For reference, here's a video on how bombardier beetles make their particular explosions of hot chemicals)
posted by filthy light thief at 11:13 AM on March 2, 2016 [6 favorites]

Isaac the dude. Who was an enormous asshole

"If I am more enormous than most, it is because I was farted out of the assholes of giants".
-- Isaac Newton, Asshole.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 11:15 AM on March 2, 2016 [18 favorites]

Huh. As a science-y kid growing up, I have to say I got bored of all the science history and scientist stories. I always consider the science to be more important than the discoverers. Maybe some people just need a narrative, or something.
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:18 AM on March 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

This is very interesting, but I feel like I'm not going to remember any of it unless I know more about Xiaodong Lin-Siegler...
posted by staccato signals of constant information at 11:21 AM on March 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

The scientist's struggles are just as compelling, and I think just as profound as their work. Galileo and 'and yet it moves'. Turing and the poisoned apple. My local hero who put their life at risk, essentially experimenting on themselves and later winning a Nobel prize.

Science is inspiring. Scientists are inspiring.
posted by adept256 at 11:22 AM on March 2, 2016

It's worth noting this study only applied to low performing schools, though.
posted by corb at 11:56 AM on March 2, 2016

Fucking seriously. If you learn that all your heroes are perfect, and you know that you are not perfect, then you know that you will never be a hero.
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:08 PM on March 2, 2016 [12 favorites]

This is so sensible. Every person, including every kid, knows their own fallibility. That other people, who have also achieved great things, are fallible and human and have experienced failure is actually inspiring. It is the people like Wolfgang Mozart, who for all his personal troubles and illnesses seemed to produce extraordinary music almost effortlessly, who are really daunting.
posted by bearwife at 12:12 PM on March 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

I can't wait to become fantastically successful so I can give a talk entitled "My Failures."
posted by the_blizz at 12:15 PM on March 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

A demographically diverse group of 402 9th and 10th grade students read 1 of 3 types of stories about eminent scientists that described how the scientists (a) struggled intellectually (e.g., made mistakes in investigating scientific problems, and overcame the mistakes through effort), (b) struggled in their personal life (e.g., suffered family poverty and lack of parental support but overcame it), or (c) made great discoveries (a control condition, similar to the instructional material that appears in many science textbooks, that did not describe any struggles).

It would be interesting to see if there is any significant difference between groups A and B.

Also, I wonder if the "struggle" is the important part or if it is simply learning about particular science as more than just a collection of facts.
Are the students simply paying more attention because Faraday is now a person not just a name they have to memorize?
posted by madajb at 12:35 PM on March 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think it's also important to consider the kinds of failures that get talked about. The ones I like to bring up most are along the lines of Darwin's, that I mentioned, or things like Linus Pauling's vehement insistence that the structure of DNA was a triple helix, or Thomas Hunt Morgan's weird-ass "every mutation is a NEW SPECIES" evolutionary theory, or that famous story about Sewall Wright accidentally erasing his blackboard with a guinea pig in the middle of class. Not "they struggled bravely against all odds," but "they made dumb mistakes" or "sometimes they were REALLY wrong" or "seriously, he was super quiet and shy so no one listened, even though he was right" or "he, too, occasionally walked into a wall and was publicly embarrassing." The kind of idiot things that happen to all of us.

As bearwife says, people like Mozart who do things effortlessly are really intimidating. They are also pretty uncommon in the greater scheme of things, as scientists go. One of my jobs when I'm mentoring people getting started in science, or when I'm teaching people, is to get across the level of effort that most famous, influential minds actually had to get across to achieve the things they did--and to humanize them in the process, so they step down from their pedestals and become actually relatable. Demystification, as it were.
posted by sciatrix at 12:37 PM on March 2, 2016 [9 favorites]

Kids should learn about the failed theories that got it wrong in subtle ways, and the people that spent entire lifetimes defending them. Get kids to challenge phlogiston or an aether so they can learn science is about testing theories and finding better ones when they don't conform to reality. Newton and Einstein are especially bad examples since they both did amazing amounts of prescient work in such a short time (despite Newton being an incredible asshole personally). Actually, covering Newton's interest in alchemy and ignorance of Robert Boyle's work would make a good case that even geniuses get lots of things wrong (cf. Linus Pauling).
posted by benzenedream at 12:37 PM on March 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Isaac Newton may have been an asshole, but he was Neil deGrasse Tyson's favorite asshole (or as he would say, "baddass"). Yes, that's the clip THAT meme came from. And I don't know if this increases or reduces my respect for NdT...
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:55 PM on March 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's sort of a correlary to the "Hygiene Hypothesis". Protecting kids too much is bad for them.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 1:06 PM on March 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think that stories about the lives of scientists is immensely helpful, especially for contextualizing people's discoveries and making them seem like real people. My favorite Darwin story I share with my students is about him harassing Galapagos iguanas. Basically, he was amazed at how naive to humans they were, and spent a lot of time picking them up and throwing them into the ocean, whereupon they would swim right back to land and allow him to pick them up again and toss them back into the ocean. He eventually figured out that they have no natural land predators, and that when they were stressed they instinctively swam to shore. This worked great when they were fleeing sharks or seals; less great when fleeing an asshole naturalist.

It's hard to get students to feel connected to a lot of this sort of early basic foundational research, especially given the mythologizing of these Great White European Men who Did Science and a student body which is often not white and/or not male, and certainly not feeling Great. Stories about struggles, failures and missteps, and foibles along the way to Creating Great Science are part of what makes science a living, breathing cultural process, and part of what I appreciate about it.
posted by ChuraChura at 2:34 PM on March 2, 2016 [20 favorites]

I think this would be so beneficial for girls as well, since we're socialized to be so upset and perfect about never making a mistake. Did Marie Curie ever make a mistake?
posted by yueliang at 3:01 PM on March 2, 2016 [7 favorites]

_{Darwin is a great example of this in so many ways, really. Would that other disciplines could have such lovingly failtastic founders.}
posted by sciatrix at 3:04 PM on March 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Sciatrix, I've been running with that quote and sending it to all of my friends who are in graduate school, they find it soooo funny and loving, and I just put it in my profile. SO AMAZING.
posted by yueliang at 3:05 PM on March 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

That's an awesome Darwin quote, sciatrix, thanks! I did a quick google and found this page that shows the letter in his handwriting (and plenty of other sites, I just searched on the beginning of the quote and got several sources)
posted by msbubbaclees at 3:24 PM on March 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Yueliang, one of the reasons I fell into primatology is because I read Jane Goodall's book as a kid and found her incredibly relatable and interesting. She spent the first 5 months in the field basically unable to do more than hear chimpanzees and see the leaves rustling as they fled from her in terror. It made my first few months in the rain forest feeling totally overwhelmed and not quite with it or productive or awesome enough much more manageable.

Another person who's awesome in this respect is Alfred Russel Wallace, who is fantastic, and, though White and A Man, grew up much more working class than Traveling Naturalists like Darwin. He was funding his travels by collecting curiosities for wealthy people, and spent something like 7 years in South America collecting samples and taking notes and stuff, and then the ship he was taking back to England caught on fire and sunk with all of his samples and notes! Also, his brother died of some fever or other during the time he was wandering around the Amazon. He eventually regrouped and went off to the Malay Archipelago where he caught malaria and came up with the theory of Natural Selection in a fever dream ... and then sent it off to Darwin to read, who freaked out about being scooped, and (because Lyell was a good guy and told him to do so), published it sort of jointly with On the Origin of Species. My students love the interaction between Darwin and Wallace. David Quammen has a great book about it, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin.
posted by ChuraChura at 3:40 PM on March 2, 2016 [10 favorites]

I took a boatload of courses in the history of science and technology in college. What always struck me was that so much stuff was chronologically dependent on disparate disciplines. Then when we layered on the social and political happenings along with various perscutions... Well it helps me remember history.
posted by Nanukthedog at 3:44 PM on March 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

My favorite Darwin anecdote is that the entire reason he was on the Beagle voyage is that he was managing to fuck up his life, even as a landed Victorian gentleman, and Darwin's father was all "You are done making your own choices, young man, you have fucked up medical school, and I am done with your nonsense. Just...get out of the country, and try not to be too much of a fuck up, okay? Please take this opportunity to un-fuck-up your life." So he goes on the voyage, brings his copy of Principles, and so on and so forth. But he comes back, and he is still kind of an anxious ruminating fuck up, as far as most people could tell. The "occupation" of "naturalist" is often Victorian for "oh my God, you need to do a thing...just anything, just please do a thing, you are embarrassing your family, please look like you are trying to do something and not hiding in bed or under your desk, that's all we ask."

For all his flaws of being himself and a person of his era, Charles Darwin is one of the most humanly recognizable historic scientific figures. Partly because he so obsessively recorded all of his dithering and internal drama--OH MY GOD, CHARLIE, YOU WERE THE MOST DRAMA--and personal quirks and we can read them today, but really because his problems were really quotidian and he struggled with them. Honestly, and truly struggled with everyday tasks and shit all of the time. Again, he was a Victorian gentleman...he didn't overcome a Dickensian childhood or anything.

I love that about him. Or maybe it's just Stockholm syndrome from all of the Lyell-Darwin correspondence I read for my senior thesis in undergrad....
posted by Naamah at 3:50 PM on March 2, 2016 [31 favorites]

This is related to growth versus fixed mindsets (sometimes a misapplied concept), and yes yueliang, research has shown that growth mindsets can be particularly important and beneficial for girls or kids from other underrepresented groups in STEM fields.
posted by eviemath at 4:38 PM on March 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

Isaac Newton was just misunderstood. He was playing a whole new ballgame. Feigning no hypotheses. Just the observations and the rigorously deriveable mathematical inferences. What causes gravity? Who the hell knows? It is not going to enhance your agreeableness when you are the only guy doing it that way and everybody else is complaining.

My favorite Newton story is in the middle of the Leibniz brouhaha some continental Leibnizian showed up at his office and pointed out an error in one of his papers. He dropped everything he was doing, corrected the calculation, and spent two days checking it five different ways.

When was the last time you checked one of your calculations five different ways?

In Charles MacKay's book he reports that Newton lost his life savings in the South Sea Bubble, which is a great retort if anybody ever taunts you with the "if you are so smart then why ain't you rich?" thing.
posted by bukvich at 5:00 PM on March 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Reading—biographical and autobiographical literature—about Turing, Einstein, Feynman, Erdős, Grothendieck, and many others, including artists (Debussy, Edward Tufte) and other people (Aaron Swartz) who made it their calling to be "creative" in various ways, was one of the activities that sustained myself through my college education and graduate school. It was a form of bibliotherapy that took the guise of cultural awareness: often it wasn't their main work that I took away, but rather their circumstances, and their questions and doubts and choices, and from these the internal conflicts they must have faced, that I have thought back on.

"Modernist" science has oft preferred a stance of silence on the personal life of the individual; it's the ideology behind "letting the work speak for itself" and the supposed advantages that that brings. But, being interested in people is a totally natural attitude—science is a culture—and scientific research like this is helpful in affirming that.
posted by polymodus at 5:16 PM on March 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Linus Pauling's vehement insistence that the structure of DNA was a triple helix

Oh man, Bruno Latour has a whole thing about that story, about how Pauling had basically made a fundamental error, and that his proposed structure wasn't possible. Francis Crick read Pauling's paper, noticed the mistake because it was similar to their own aborted attempt, and was basically like "wait, did the top chemist in the world make a really basic mistake?" And then Crick and Watson knew Pauling would figure it out, and that as soon as he did he'd work nonstop to try to figure out the right structure. But by this point it had been submitted to a major journal and was soon to be seen by the entire world, so it became this mad dash to try to figure out what the structure was before this total giant of a chemist noticed the error he'd made and corrected it. It took all this constant checking and rechecking, and even then they kind of barely pulled it off.

But they did! And now it's this kind of scientific fact. We look back on their discovery as this great moment, which it was, but behind all of it was this totally human kind of drama. The matter is settled now, but the point is that a million different things could have happened instead of what we got, and it's kind of amazing that there are so many small parts that go into it.
posted by teponaztli at 5:22 PM on March 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

One of Jacques Barzun's essays I read a long time ago argued that all scholarship in the humanities, regardless of the field, winds up relying on the methods of historians.

So why not science? It makes sense that explaining the discoveries of scientists is best done as history.
posted by ocschwar at 7:46 PM on March 2, 2016

Pity, though, that the scientists responsible for the discovery of the greenhouse effect all lived distinctly undramatic lives.

Tyndall. Arrhenius. Callendar. Keeling. All of them lived lives that would quickly drop a biographer into a stupor.

If only one of them had the foresight to be an abused orphan..
posted by ocschwar at 7:48 PM on March 2, 2016

ocschwar: Pity, though, that the scientists responsible for the discovery of the greenhouse effect all lived distinctly undramatic lives.

But that's the way it goes the vast majority of the time, especially now. "Hero science" used to be a thing, sort of, but now nearly all major discoveries are made by teams where everyone contributes a tiny amount to the overall whole. It's been that way for a while. And even back in the day, I suspect most of the science was that way as well; you just don't hear about the guys who make the small, incremental discoveries.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:17 PM on March 2, 2016

ChuraChura, another Darwin Galapagos story I like is about how he apparently couldn't stop himself from eating the delicious, delicious giant tortoises he'd intended to bring back as samples for the Royal Society. Not sure if I've got the details correct, but I love the idea that when writing the conclusion of the Origin and the passage about it being "interesting to contemplate a tangled bank," he might have just been thinking about lunch.
posted by biogeo at 9:40 PM on March 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

On a related note: thanks to Hamilton, I have now become the sort of crazy person who now reads presidential biographies for fun (jeebus help me). I just finished a book on Monroe. Wanna know how it starts so far?

(a) Monroe is heroic and gets promoted. However, there's so many chiefs and not enough peons in the military that he just cannot get any people to command, no matter who he
begs (Washington, Lafayette, Jefferson, etc). He also doesn't have the bribe money to get people to join the military. Several years of "can't get a job," pretty much.

(b) Monroe wins public office....in Virginia, a state where they don't actually want elected officials DOING ANYTHING. Seriously, the elected officials just sit around yakking and gambling all damn day. That's a few more years. He also gets his law degree, but he's living in Richmond, which was totally trashed by the British and hardly anyone's left there to need law help. Then the next office he holds (Congress), most people stop showing up after awhile, those who do hate it, most people aren't even able to vote on much of anything, it's all totally pointless.

(c) Monroe finally gets a job where he can do some shit, minister to France. Where he does heroic shit like rescue the Lafayette family and Thomas Paine. However, John Jay screwing up the treaty + political party changes means Monroe gets shit canned and doesn't know why, and he comes home to hear a bunch of rumors about himself. Also, Hamilton is pissed as hell because Monroe stupidly revealed the whole Reynolds affair to Jefferson, who got it all publicized while Monroe was out of the country.

Oh yeah, and most of the time he is dead broke because he rarely if ever gets paid and is usually paying his own expenses. And he has two deadbeat brothers racking up debt in his name on top of that.

This guy eventually becomes president (near unanimously), manages to more or less get rid of other political parties, gets re-elected, and helmed the "Era of Good Feelings," so clearly something got better sometime....

I dunno, but it's making me feel a bit better for being a loser now.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:51 PM on March 2, 2016 [8 favorites]

"I've missed over 9,000 shots in my career.
I've lost almost 300 games.
26 times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.
I've failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed." - Michael Jordan

This is a very important psychological and cultural lesson. If you succeed, you will have faced setbacks, obstacles, detours and upsets, as that's part and parcel of human endeavor. Preparing kids for failure, and giving them skills for coping with it and moving past their failures, should be an essential part of education. Describing the setbacks and struggles of famous scientists, and the wonderful results that they lead to, is a great idea.
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:07 AM on March 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh, hey, here's an update on Monroe: he gets elected to being governor of Virginia, which is just as useless as being any other state official in Virginia because the people who wrote the state constitution didn't want officials to DO anything. Dude has virtually no power in his job. But he manages to basically talk the entire state into doing better, creating better legislation, and giving him more executive power until it becomes the most powerful office in the state and everyone loves him and he gets elected to four terms.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:35 PM on March 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

Hey Naamah, if a person who's never read anything about Darwin wanted to, is there a particular book you'd recommend?
posted by Lexica at 1:32 PM on March 4, 2016 [1 favorite]